Vendors offer products and/or services for sale and/or rent. Therefore, an offering can be a product, integrated products, a set of products, and/or a service. Examples of products are a laptop computer, a disc drive, and a software application. An example of a product integration is multiple storage devices used to store copies of data integrated and configured so that metadata about these copies are stored on one of these devices and the copies are stored on the other devices. Another example of a product integration is a first storage device optimized to store application data and a second storage device optimized to store copies of data which are integrated and configured so data from the first storage device are transferred to the second storage device directly without the use of another device. Examples of product sets are a laptop computer with a wireless printer, and computers connected by a local area network. Examples of services are the data backup and restore services provided by EMC Corporation's Avamar® backup/restore application and EMC Corporation's NetWorker® backup/restore application.
When an offering functions in an undesirable manner, the offering may or may not provide an error message that describes a possible problem with the offering. An offering's user or the offering's administrator may use such an error message, or free form text describing the error conditions when no error message is available, to identify possible remediations for the offering's problem.